XelaP

Karma: 1,142

Came for the Harry Potter fanfic, a positive vision of what do with atheism, and the anti-death ethos. Stayed for the good thinking.

I really like math and physics. I can program but am not a programmer—I’d have to learn how to make a website and struggle to handle more than a couple hundred LOC. Learning a little Haskell made me enjoy coding again, I’d like to get better at it.

I’m currently very bad at following through on commitments. I hope to fix this by tomorrow. I’ll probably fail, but I shoot for getting it down before my fifty thousandth tomorrow.

XelaP 16 Aug 2026 14:16 UTC
2 points
0
on: A clarification on celebrating victory
To go from my current state of eating a sundae whenever I want to a state of eating a sundae only as a reward, I have to give up the freedom I previously had—which hurts even if I wasn’t even eating sundaes in the first place!
I agree that the sundae functions like a decoration. I’ll try to describe the feeling of the “concretifying”: it’s the thrill and raw sensory experience of sweet stuff going in your mouth, while you are already feeling the high of the accomplishment. This works even if you don’t ever give up your access to the reward at other times, as you can pick something that you’d get tired of quickly or that you just don’t feel like doing unless you are already a bit pumped.

XelaP 16 Aug 2026 13:52 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Expertium’s comment on: Are Manifold prediction markets well-calibrated?
Does manifold report number of traders at a specific time?

XelaP 16 Aug 2026 8:15 UTC
2 points
0
on: Redux: (∃ Stochastic Natural Latent) Implies (∃ Deterministic Natural Latent)
For fun, a manifold market on how low it gets by the end of September (with a 2 week grace period for verifying proofs): https://manifold.markets/Xelad102c/how-low-will-the-constant-in-the-de?r=WGVsYWQxMDJj

XelaP 16 Aug 2026 6:57 UTC
4 points
2
on: Metaphilosophy II: Empirical Flywheels
1.6.2.3 The nature of money. From where does money derive its value? One answer: it is an arbitrary yet consistent fixed-point in valuing-space, emergently useful for coordination. This—in contrast to other answers such as that money’s value derives from the state—reveals that something like bitcoin should be possible.
You could also go back a step: both “the state” and “social valuation for coordination purposes” reveal that fiat currency (even unbacked by any material goods) could work, in contrast to the view that the currency itself must be precious.

XelaP 15 Aug 2026 2:26 UTC
4 points
0
on: Scrying, Modeling, and Nerdsnipe
Scrying is staring hard at one thing, in order to try to find out about another. In the occult origins, it’s often a mirror or glass, viewed under darkened conditions to inspire hallucination.
I like this framing, but there’s some detail that I see as key here. When famous math problems are stated, usually what’s really going on is a bet that solving the problem will require working out a theory that lets you understand an area better. The problem is then meant to focus your efforts in a way that you hope will necessarily increase your general abilities.
This isn’t just a math thing, by the way. When learning new skills, it’s often useful to give yourself a specific goal (like “I am reading this physics textbook so that I can code up a physics simulation”), even when the goal is not the real point. If you were trying to build a rocket before modern science, “Let’s have a third of you figure out how to predict the motion of objects, a third to build a really tall tower, and the rest will make really big explosions” is a plausible plan to figure out the requisite physics/materials science/chemistry.
The bet can be a bad one, for example if a conjecture can be disproven by using standard techniques applied in standard ways then you haven’t really learned what you wanted to.
I suspect that the recent AI proofs have a higher number of cases like this, and I’ve seen some mathematicians say that this is what happened. However, I’m wary of trusting them, because many seem biased enough that they’d downplay the results.

XelaP 13 Aug 2026 16:13 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Harjas’s comment on: What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment
My formative experiences with projectile motion was throwing/kicking/hitting various balls as a kid, and those definitely go in parabolas. Most items that I notice myself dropping are objects at least as massive as a pen, and so it definitely matters that they continuously accelerate, even if it indeed looks as if they only do so briefly at the beginning.
Aristotle claiming that heavier objects fall faster,(especially with the observation that the relationship isn’t proportional, and more bonus points if other qualitative features were discovered) is fine. Failing to describe football is the real problem
Also, are you sure the Greeks didn’t have the math? They knew what parabolas were. Sure, they didn’t have calculus—but nor did Galileo!

XelaP 13 Aug 2026 12:58 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: Harjas’s comment on: What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment
I’ve heard this before, and it still seems trivially wrong about everyday experience. When was the last time that you saw an object falling at terminal velocity, vs the last time you saw an object fall much slower than it? Most of the time that I deal with stuff moving through air, it’s following Newtonian parabolas, because air is thin enough that air resistance is often irrelevant!

XelaP 9 Aug 2026 20:57 UTC
2 points
0
on: “Community Notes” resolution for vague predictions
To be clear, your proposal does not include a prediction market of any sort, just AI automated operationalizations + user voted results?
I think giving twitter users some internet points they can use to bet on the markets, like with manifold, may just work. But it’s possible that the public won’t use it in a useful way compared to user voting.

XelaP 2 Aug 2026 6:58 UTC
9 points
1
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.

XelaP 2 Aug 2026 5:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: strawberry calm’s Shortform
One problem is that (from my outsider view) one major way people become more impactful is by working on less tractable but higher impact and neglectedness stuff! Earlier work may be more biased towards tractability: you aren’t confident in your own abilities, aren’t already established and so need more career capital, and typically they look more legibly good.

I’m not saying skewing towards career capital should be entirely off-limits, but given the way biases work one should be wary

XelaP 2 Aug 2026 1:28 UTC
2 points
0
on: Enemies vs Malefactors
The way I think about this is through the lens of Player vs Character. If the ‘player’ is exploiting you, you still need to respond, even as the ‘character’ honestly isn’t trying to hurt you.
An important part of this is the way that someone who is causing harm due to neither the player or the character being exploitative differs from an exploitative player. One involves someone being nudged down incentive gradients adversarial to your interests, while the other is causing harm for some other reason—imagine the difference between someone who says rude words in a way that increases their own social power as opposed to someone who just has Tourettes.

XelaP 31 Jul 2026 23:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Are bread crusts healthier?
I seem to observe the opposite. For low quality bread, the crust is at least nice and crunchy, with a little extra flavor. For high quality bread, the interior is so wonderful that it outperforms the crust. This is especially true if it has some fruit baked into it.

XelaP 31 Jul 2026 23:22 UTC
2 points
0
on: Are bread crusts healthier?
Do most people really find the crust so unpleasant?
As for the mechanism:
Firstly, it feels good if we can improve our lives via a simple action, and so we are biased in favor of theories that give us a way to do so.
Secondly, crusts seem sorta like whole grain bread (because it’s darker and tougher, and consists of the outside skin), which really is healthier. The heuristic “the skin contains healthy nutrients” is simply correct for grain.
Thirdly, most people probably heard the myth while young, and it takes time to update your intuitions.
Embarrassingly, I hadn’t realized that the reason bread has a crust is because it’s the outside of the thing you heat up, and so was heated more! When I’ve interacted with something since childhood (especially if I have no memories predating it), it will seem familiar to me. The heuristics that nudge me to investigate will act as if I’ve already investigated it.
How many other people hadn’t really realized what crusts are?

XelaP 29 Jul 2026 7:17 UTC
5 points
0
on: [Intuitive self-models] 5. Dissociative Identity (Multiple Personality) Disorder
I appear to feel more ‘mild amnesia’ with ordinary emotional states than others. When happy, I will intuitively mispredict what I’ll think when sad, and it will intuitively feel like I’ve always felt happy and always will. Similarly when sad. As a mundane example, I will intuitively overestimate how much food I’ll want while hungry, but underestimate while full—to combat this I do something similar to the outside-view technique for the planning fallacy, by ignoring my current judgements and instead asking “How much food do I tend to eat? What food do I tend to like?”

XelaP 29 Jul 2026 6:57 UTC
4 points
0
on: [Intuitive self-models] 4. Trance
Some people (including me, but I have strong reasons to think I’m unusually susceptible) can get hypnotized by a simple video, so if you’re curious you may want to try this 15 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Tf33yqpxk
It appeared to me to work by inducing a dissociative state. This might be distressing if you’ve never felt one before or have distressing ones—for example, temporarily being unable to recall your own name is understandably likely to distress many.
For myself: the arm-pushing thing worked, the name forgetting didn’t, the sleepy thing did seem to make me meaningfully more relaxed, and I didn’t attempt the metaphorical app deleting thing.

XelaP 28 Jul 2026 20:41 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Long (Self-)Correction
Why isn’t there a version of EA that explicitly talks about how to leverage people’s status motivations to do more good for the world? It’s very possible that explicit talk about status is actually counterproductive at least in the short run, e.g. it heightens status motivations and makes people less altruistic, but then do we just march into the future while blindfolding ourselves to this aspect of human nature?
Wait, what? As far as I understood it, that was explicitly a main consideration in the 10% pledge Schelling point, though it’s possible that I may have just came up with that argument myself and misattributed it.

XelaP 28 Jul 2026 7:06 UTC
7 points
0
on: Inevitable Uncertainty in Probabilistic World Models
I think a lot of explanations of statistical mechanics either don’t mention or don’t give enough focus on the way that basically everything depends on what probabilistic model you’re using. The most important quantity is the entropy (from which temperature is defined), and is a prime example: definitionally it requires a probability distribution, so “entropy (with very high probability) goes up over time” only makes sense if you pick a probability distribution.
However, often explanations of entropy talk about it as if it was a physical substance like energy (at least when they aren’t describing it as “chaos!”), to my continual frustration.
In fact, I wonder if having every student learning thermodynamics or statistical mechanics read some of John’s posts would make them understand it better. I definitely think it deconfused me about the foundations of the subject!
Perhaps another way of looking at it: Imagine searching for low-complexity models of the world, trying to figure out what code the universe is running. The lowest complexity program may explicitly define fish_mean = 52; fish_variance = 5 , and then pseudo-randomly draw from a normal distribution to determine how many fish there are. The Solomonoff Prior then might still have uncertainty about what the fish_mean variable was set to.

XelaP 27 Jul 2026 19:17 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Nick Bostrom: How big is the cosmic endowment?
Except, any physical reversible computing device is surely going to have to mantain itself against random fluctuations, which may make there be mounds on how long actually achievable devices could compute for.

XelaP 27 Jul 2026 3:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: David Joshua Sartor’s comment on: Visioning: Concretely Imagining What You Want
That link appears to be dead now, do you have other descriptors (brand? name?) about the product?

The problem with just adding more primary colors to a display is that my eyes are still using only three types of cones. Adding extra primaries will at best let you explore a bit more of the region of colors than a normal monitor can. The advantage of converting other spectra to the visible is so that I can see it at all, even if it looks identical to a normal color—basically, false-color for my eyes.

XelaP 26 Jul 2026 17:59 UTC
2 points
0
on: Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough.
I was linked to this post after I showed someone my own example of level-5/6 reasoning that came up naturally. I think this example fits entirely within my head, without being ‘externalized’:
A stereotype, say “trans women are predators” is a level-1 belief about a group.
A meta-stereotype, say “cis people believe trans women are predators”, is a level-2 belief about what stereotypes others hold.
A meta-meta-stereotype, say “trans people believe cis people believe trans women are predators”, is a level-3 awareness of what meta-stereotype someone holds. A cis person might hold this belief, and react by acting extra-nice to a trans woman, in hopes of signalling that they are not prejudiced.
A meta-meta-meta-stereotype happens when I (a trans woman) am aware that people might do the previous, and so might discount niceties by strangers.
A meta-meta-meta-meta-stereotype happens when someone is aware that I’ll be discounting their niceties. In this case they may react by trying to ensure they aren’t too over-the-top.
I, of course, have no trouble imagining being such a person—and so am operating at level-6, though in real life I haven’t really been able to observe someone intentionally trying to tone down their niceties to make them feel genuine (but it’s surely happened). I know I’ve naturally thought “If I were such a person, interacting with me, I’d maybe start off with an extra-nice signal, but from then on act naturally and genuinely”.
Internally, it feels like what is actually being thought is:
1. “I don’t want them to think I’m prejudiced, so I’ll make sure to be clearly nice” (effectively level-2, as ‘prejudiced’ is treated like an attribute like ‘tall’)
2. “They’re just trying to look unprejudiced, I can’t trust their niceties to be genuine” (effectively level-3)
3. “I don’t want them to think I’m just trying to look unprejudiced, so I shouldn’t be too over-the-top” (effectively level-4)